Executive Program Director – Food, Land And Water, WRI India
Dr Ruchika Singh
Dr. Ruchika Singh is the Executive Program Director of Food, Land, and Water at WRI India, with more than two decades of experience working on environmental and developmental issues, providing leadership, and building programs.
At WRI India, she provides overall strategic direction on how to inform India’s transition towards sustainable food and land use systems with a focus on strengthening the food systems. The program focus is on three key pillars of work around Produce, Protect and Restore, and Reduce, which includes landscape restoration, food loss and waste, and sustainable agriculture. She also focuses on developing solutions with a crossing-cutting lens of people, nature, and climate with intersectionality and a focus on enhancing livelihoods. She is responsible for overall strategy development and integration with institutional goals, fundraising, developing partnerships, leadership, research, and program management at WRI India.
Before working with World Resources Institute and WRI India, Ruchika was an independent research consultant for the World Bank and led two studies on the Forest Rights Act in India. Ruchika began her career with the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES), Dahod, where she worked with the local community on rights, livelihood, gender, and institution building for local self-governance and management of common land. After that, while at the Development and Research Service (DRS), New Delhi, she coordinated a ‘study to prepare a status report on the village industries in rural India.’ She has also worked with the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in New Delhi. At TERI, she has had experience conducting evidence-based research as a team leader and/or member on institutional and governance issues related to various aspects of natural resource management and its governance, socio-economic assessment, monitoring and evaluation, and gender equity issues. Ruchika has taught courses on World Politics and Globalization, Governance, and World Order at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has also developed course modules on Gender and Water and institutional and governance issues at TERI University, New Delhi. She has worked in interdisciplinary environments with diverse actors -local communities, grassroots-level institutions, government departments, NGOs, bilateral and multilateral organizations, partner organizations, and funders at various levels.
Ruchika holds a PhD (magna cum laude) in Development Studies (with a focus on water governance) from the Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn. She also holds a double Master’s in Politics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a Master’s in Development Studies from the International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague part of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Ruchika is an alumnus of Xavier Institute of Social Service and Delhi University. She is a recipient of the NUFFIC Fellowship award for Master in Development Studies at ISS, the Graduate Assistantship Award for Master in Political Science at UMass, Amherst, a DAAD Doctoral fellowship at ZEF, University of Bonn, and a Fieldwork research grant from Dr. Hermann Eiselen Ph.D. Grant from the Fiat Panis Foundation.
Ruchika likes traveling, taking photographs, and reading in her spare time.
